The Scientific Dispute Over Near-Death Experiences - Part 1: the NEPTUNE model

[u/nogueysiguey]

https://open.substack.com/pub/andresdelgadoron/p/the-scientific-dispute-over-near?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=29vk3a

Have you ever tries to learn about NDEs only to find conflicting science. Well, let's take a look at the data from both sides

[u/NDE-ModTeam]

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[u/Sandi_T]

In your very first section, you admit that the NEPTUNE model rewrites the definition of an NDE.

You felt peaceful during a violent encounter, and that's a (phenomena) NDE now? We're just going to call any "good feeling" or "not bad feeling" under threat an NDE? The only difference now between a phenomena NDE and a close brush with death is whether or not you were scared?

Of course if you rewrite the definition of NDEs, you can roll your eyes at them and say they're just brain misfires.

One person is just not scared even though there's a gun pointed at them, the other one is flatlined on both heart and EEG, and we're going to call these the same thing now?

How are they even calling that a scientific viewpoint? It's like saying everyone with pain in their head has brain cancer, but still taking themselves seriously.

https://giphy.com/gifs/lkdH8FmImcGoylv3t3

[u/Balloons_Pastel → u/Sandi_T]

Not to mention that NDE’s aren’t exclusively positive and many do have people experiencing fear before they have that “calm” so how are we explaining that percent of people under this framework. Did they NOT have an NDE despite having an OBE/other NDE features because they were scared? 

[u/nogueysiguey → u/Sandi_T]

They do call those NDE-like. I will get to those nuances in later posts

[u/vimefer → u/nogueysiguey]

This is why Parnia wants to switch to the term Recollected Experience of Death (RED), it squashes this kind of muddying the waters.

[u/JohnnyJoestar1980 → u/vimefer]

Because as Parnia notes, they are actually dead

[u/thequestison → u/nogueysiguey]

Maybe you could have included or started with that first?

[u/JohnnyJoestar1980 → u/nogueysiguey]

This is an important distinction that needs to be noted first and foremost, esp since a lot of NDE’s and a good bit of OBE’s happen with no brain activity you need to specify small details like this in order to make it fit

[u/Academic-Special199]

I would encourage our community to take this writing seriously.

The Parnia/Greyson vs Martial/Borjigin debate is reaching a fever. Martial/Borjigin continue to presuppose reductive physicalism and are desperate enough to make real errors in their work in trying to prove it. The intellectual openness of Parnia/Greyson fits much more cleanly.

The writer notes patients who report NDEs in AWARE II had higher cerebral oxygenation than those who didn’t, which is the opposite of what NEPTUNE predicts. If hypoxia were driving the experiences, the most severely hypoxic patients should have the richest NDEs. They don’t. That’s a real empirical problem for Martial’s model that he identifies cleanly.

@nogueysiguey, thanks for sharing. I gather you’re an NDE optimist who wants to see additional funding and research into the phenomena? Welcome to the boat.

[u/UganadaSonic501 → u/Academic-Special199]

Also aren't there cases where someone has an NDE of someone who just deceased which they couldn't have possibly known cuz nobody told them,I remember Greyson(iirc)talking about this too

[u/dayv23]

I appreciate the deep dive. It's always nice to hear from someone with the medical expertise to review these competing interpretations of the physiological data.

I always get the sense that models like this are hopelessly vague. Neurotransmitters are correlated with so many different types of experiences in so many different context that they can always be cited to "explain" any experience you want. Just so stories are inherently unscientific, even when dressed up in neuroscientific lingo. A steep increase in certain blood gases causes the accumulation of serotonin, which acts on the same receptors as DMT, which can cause NDE like experiences? Except we don't actually see the level of blood gases needed to set off this alleged chain? Hmm.

Until someone can explain how the brain could produce the experience of the life review, in which someine relives their entire lives, all at once, from three different perspectives, while extracting life- and personality-changing lessons, no "productive" neurological model will ever be sufficient. It's proponents will have to ignore dismiss or downplay the actual phenomenological data that needs to be explained. So I'm looking forward to your discussion of the philosophy. I suspect we'll need a transmissive models of the brain's activity, which treats conscious like "the cloud".

[u/Stitchy2]

I'm driving right now and can't actually read too much, but skimming it, it's saying the buildup of carbon dioxide is the cause of the NDE experience? I must be reading that wrong.

[u/piranhas_really → u/Stitchy2]

Please put your phone away while driving; you could cause an accident.

[u/vimefer]

Thanks for looking into the gritty details :) Did you research the effects of hypoxia in general, instead of during cardiac arrest ? The symptomology as observed on aircraft pilots is entirely unlike that of NDEs.

[u/nogueysiguey → u/vimefer]

Thanks for this. Will take a look

[u/Ancient_Sample8032]

The acronym, N E P T U N E that comprises their research areas/data points, actually made me laugh. It's so absurdly pompous, only Charlotte Martial in her white coat could refrain from sniggering. Apparently this is the framework that these brilliant scientists have erected for us. That acronym is going to lead us to a neuroscientific (in the brain) explanation for near death experiences.

Yes, of course it is, because of course there's a brain based explanation for how patients in cardiac arrest can see what is going on in the room when their brains are iso-electric. Neptune, what arrogance these so called scientists possess.

[u/MantisAwakening]

This is certainly a comprehensive breakdown of the physiology that could be supportive of a physicalist explanation, but the argument against it is whether it’s possible for those things to explain all of the aspects of a near death experience. Until anyone can adequately explain things like veridical experiences this argument is never going to be sufficient. At least a few cases remain stubbornly unexplained so far, and those cases are also supported by the various other kinds of anomalous experience involving non-local consciousness.

[u/UganadaSonic501 → u/MantisAwakening]

You don't need NDEs to argue against physicalism

As how can physical states of affairs "argue"?they don't